A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The handpicked nature of the assembly precluded any serious disagreement over the essentials of Graham’s address, and subsequent speakers reinforced and elaborated most of his major points in more than 180 meetings over the remaining ten days of the conference. The one gnat of contention that could not be strained out was his prescription regarding social action. The sponsoring organization itself was divided on this matter. Carl Henry and some other key people at Christianity Today (CT) had wanted the congress to devote more attention to social responsibility, and some speakers did address such issues as the relationship between Evangelism and race. But Howard Pew, who still provided major support to the magazine, firmly believed involvement in social action would spell “the end of Protestantism as a spiritual and ecclesiastical institution” and wanted the congress to stand firm against efforts by church bodies to influence economic and political institutions in any kind of direct manner. Graham took a middle position, wanting to emphasize evangelism without denigrating social action, which he thought would inevitably follow individual conversion.

  Black participants generally criticized the tendency of Evangelicalism to manifest “not only passivity in social matters, but also, by default, a tacit support of the status quo.” And BGEA evangelist Howard Jones charged that racism “is the question on which the whole cause of evangelism will stand or fall in the non-white countries of the world, and we are ignoring it.” When BGEA and CT board member Maxey Jarman warned against being “tempted by the seeming strength [of] political power to force reforms and improvements among people” and recommended depending instead on “the faith and hope and love that comes from God” to effect social change, a black minister from Detroit responded, “Law did for me and my people in America what empty and high-powered Evangelical preaching never did for 100 years.” Overall, social issues received short shrift on the agenda, but the congress did issue a 950-word statement condemning “racialism whenever it appears,” asking forgiveness for “the failure of many of us in the recent past to speak with sufficient clarity and force upon the biblical unity of the human race” and asserting flatly that “we reject the notion that men are unequal because of distinctions of race or color.”

  Given the tightly controlled nature of both membership and message, the Berlin Congress held few real surprises, but the unlikely appearance of three remarkably disparate men, all religious leaders in their own distinctive way, provided a dash of panache that participants recalled with wonder, and some amusement, twenty years later. To appeal to Third World participants and to lend a measure of prestige to the congress, Stan Mooneyham used Billy Graham’s name and his own ingenuity to arrange for Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and protector of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) Church, to attend and address the opening session of the congress. Since visits by heads of state are ordinarily handled by government officials, German leaders were stunned, and a bit miffed, to learn that the emperor was coming to Berlin at the behest of a staff member of an ad hoc Evangelical conference. Berlin mayor Willy Brandt’s office moved quickly to take control of the visit, even going so far as to leave Billy Graham and other congress officials off the dais at a reception for Selassie, but the emperor gave Graham what he wanted when he told the gathering of the “great struggle to preserve Ethiopia as an island of Christianity” and urged the delegates to do all in their power to carry the message of salvation “to those of our fellows for whom Christ our Savior was sacrificed but who have not had the benefit of hearing the Good News.”

  A second congress attendee stirred far more lasting interest, in large measure because his participation in the conference was not just a product of an enterprising public relations machine but had real and patently obvious long-term implications for Evangelical Christianity. When Carl Henry wrote Oral Roberts in 1965 to tell him he would soon receive an invitation to the Berlin Congress, he noted his reservations about such Pentecostal phenomena as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and healing, particularly “if these are made to be central and indispensable facets of normative Christian experience.” Roberts understood all too well that Henry and Harold Ockenga, and even Billy Graham, who had always treated him with courtesy and respect, regarded his ministry and, indeed, Pentecostalism as a whole, as a peripheral and somewhat embarrassing relative. As a consequence, he accepted the invitation with considerable misgiving, later confessing that “since the healing ministry had not been understood to be an integral part of the mainstream of the Gospel, we were not sure how our ministry would be accepted or what our contribution could be to the Congress.”

  Oral’s apprehensions were not unwarranted. Mainstream Evangelicals at the congress tended to give him wide berth, and Roberts responded by spending as much time as possible holed up in his room at the Berlin Hilton. Calvin Thielman, Ruth Graham’s friendly and unpretentious pastor, made it a personal project to melt the wall of wariness that Oral and the Evangelicals had erected to protect themselves from each other. At their first encounter, which both men enjoyed, Roberts warned Thielman that being seen with him carried some risk, but Calvin pressed on. He arranged a luncheon, which he persuaded Roberts to pay for, and invited a pride of ecclesiastical lions, including the bishop of London, to sit down with the Oklahoma preacher and ask him hard questions. When Oral fielded their queries with both grace and skill, Calvin undertook to introduce his new friend to anyone who would hold still long enough to meet him.

  Inevitably, word of Thielman’s activities got back to Billy Graham, who sent a note asking Calvin to come to his room. As Thielman recounted the incident, Graham was sitting up in bed when he entered the room. Looking over his glasses, he said “T.W. tells me that you’re getting together everywhere to eat with Oral Roberts.” Feeling he was about to be cautioned, perhaps even reprimanded, Calvin protested, “Well, Billy, we invited him here and he is being avoided by people. . . . They treat him like an honorary leper.” At that, Graham interrupted, his eyes filling with tears. “God bless you for that,” he said. “You tell Oral that I want him to eat with me.” Billy followed through by inviting Oral to dinner with a small gathering of conference leaders. At the end of the evening, as he spoke briefly with each of the departing guests, he asked Roberts, “Oral, when are you going to invite me to speak to your campus?” Wary he might be, but Oral Roberts recognized a public relations bonanza when he saw one, and he shot back, “How would you like to come to the campus not only to speak but to dedicate the university?” Graham declared, “I’d be honored to do it,” and Oral Roberts suddenly found himself knee-deep in the mainstream of conservative Christianity.

  Roberts acquitted himself well as chair of a panel discussion on healing, but his most significant triumph came in an unplanned address to a plenary session. In a characteristically warm introduction, Graham said, “Our prayer is going to be led by a man that I have come to love and appreciate in the ministry of evangelism. He is in the process of building a great university. He is known throughout the world through his radio and television work, and millions of people listen to him. They read what he writes and they thank God for his ministry. I am speaking of Dr. Oral Roberts, and I’m going to ask him to say a word of greeting to us before he leads the prayer.” When the applause subsided, Roberts mesmerized the congregation with his humble confession that his doubts and fears had been “conquered by love.” “I shall always be glad that I came,” he said. “I needed to sit down and listen to someone else for a change.” As one accustomed to being the leading light in Pentecostal circles, he noted his amazement at realizing that he had been “out-preached, out-prayed, and out-organized” by the men in whose presence he stood. “I thank you, Billy, and Dr. Henry,” he said, “for helping to open my eyes to the mainstream of Christianity, and to bring me a little closer to my Lord. I have come to see the Holy Spirit in men who are here today. Yesterday I even had lunch with a Bishop. Can you imagine a Pentecostal evangelist eating with a Bishop of London?” Then he added, “We have talked of the glories of Pentecost in our
denomination, but I wonder if we have thought enough of the unity of Pentecost. I think we Pentecostals owe a debt to the historic churches, and you might owe a small debt to us, for we have held on to Pentecost. We have learned new dimensions about it, and I thank God, Billy, and all of you for that.” After thunderous and prolonged applause, Roberts led the assembly in a moving prayer in which, among other blessings sought, he adjured Satan to keep his hands off “this man, God’s servant,” Billy Graham, and implored God to anoint Billy with the Spirit as he had never before been anointed, “that he shall speak with a new force, a new power, a new vision, to this whole generation.”

  Perhaps only God knows whether Billy Graham got a new vision, but it was soon palpably obvious that Oral Roberts did, and he set out immediately to “capitalize upon our acceptance in Berlin.” For several months, he filled his Abundant Life magazine with pictures and stories of the Berlin Congress, even quoting verbatim his remarks and prayer at the triumphant plenary session. He pumped Calvin Thielman for ideas as to how he could widen the circle of friends he had made in Berlin. “You don’t realize what happened out there,” he told Calvin. “Those kind of people never spoke to me before. They have avoided me and there was no way I could ever break through it until now. This is bigger than you understand. Because you’ve lived in these circles all your life and I haven’t. I’ve been on the outside looking in.” He invited Leighton Ford and Harold Ockenga to speak at his fledgling school. And of course he held Billy Graham to his offer to give the dedication address at his university the following April. Oral knew that most of Billy’s colleagues felt he could only be harmed by the association, and the mail that came into the Minneapolis offices of BGEA confirmed that suspicion, but Graham had given his word and he kept it. Nearly 20,000 people attended the ceremony, and the media carried the word to any with eyes to see and ears to hear that Billy Graham had placed his stamp of approval on Oral Roberts and by implication on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Roberts exploited the relationship and the endorsement for every advantage it would yield, but he had been deeply and sincerely touched by the risk Billy Graham had taken. “I knew that Billy loved me,” he told a group of his supporters, “but I don’t think the public knew it.”

  A third notable swirl eddied around a man who, unlike Haile Selassie and Oral Roberts, had not been invited to the Congress. Of the Fundamentalist triumvirate of Bob Jones, John R. Rice, and Carl McIntire, only McIntire had never been personally associated with Billy Graham. He had written and published numerous critical articles about the evangelist in his newspaper, the Christian Beacon, and had sent Graham a stream of multipage letters detailing his shortcomings and calling for public renunciation of his damnable ways and apostate friends. If Graham took notice at all, he did so simply by penning a short cheek-turning note informing his attacker that “I have received your letter and have taken note of its contents. God bless you.” As one who had built a long and noisy career on rancorous confrontation, McIntire found his inability to get a rise out of Graham too much to bear and decided to smoke him out and expose him before the world Evangelical community as an appeaser of evil and error.

  McIntire neither received nor expected an invitation to attend the congress as a delegate, but he was understandably stunned when Carl Henry told him he had applied too late to receive press credentials. Henry did, however, offer him observer or visitor status with the understanding that he would not be permitted to attend press conferences or interview delegates. McIntire hooted at what he took to be a legalistic ploy to exclude him and his critical perspective. He had come to report, he snorted, not to observe or visit. Denying him access to delegates meant he would not be able to document the degree to which Communist agents, posing as faithful Christians from Eastern European countries, had wormed their way onto the delegate list and planned to use the congress to spread their poisonous ideology throughout the Christian world. As a vehement anti-Communist, McIntire was incensed that speakers had been instructed to avoid attacking communism, lest they mar the “ecumenical policy and atmosphere” of the gathering. He professed shock and chagrin that Carl Henry and his henchmen would seek to thwart the free press, especially to appease the very communism Billy Graham had once courageously opposed, and he determined not to let such high-handed tactics and disreputable motives go unnoticed. He proved true to his resolution.

  In an effort to put himself in the hallowed Reformed tradition of nailing theses to the door, McIntire issued a statement of protest against Billy Graham’s brand of ecumenical evangelism and taped it to the glass partitions at the entrance to the Kongresshalle. Then, for the duration of the congress, from morning till late evening, in bright sun and biting cold, the Fundamentalist fulminator stood outside the entrance, distributing mimeographed tirades against Graham and the apostate ecumenical evangelism he represented to any who would receive them, and declaring that the meetings inside were the most tightly controlled “of any non-Roman religious gathering I have ever seen.” McIntire recorded his putative ordeal and replayed the familiar Fundamentalist objections to Graham’s ministry in a self-published and self-absorbed harangue, aptly titled Outside the Gate. A lesser man might have been tempted to go along with the crowd and accept the status of observer or visitor, but Carl McIntire was not such a man. “Thank God I retained my liberty,” he wrote. “My separatist convictions begot such freedom.” His antagonists, he reckoned, would not enjoy the same purity of conscience. He felt certain their shameful treatment of him “will be a major issue hanging over this Congress and over Henry and Graham the rest of their lives.”

  Though McIntire was capable of venting full fury on any deviation from his own rigid canons of orthodoxy, he saw Graham’s ecumenical tendencies as more serious than everyday apostasy simply because the evangelist’s eminent stature made it possible for him to influence so many people. In premillennial teaching, one sign of the impending arrival of the Antichrist will be the formation of a single, worldwide religion. To many Fundamentalists, the near-global reach of Roman Catholicism had long made that body seem a likely candidate to smooth the path for the coming of “the beast.” Since its founding in 1948, the World Council of Churches, which sought to bring all Protestant bodies under its umbrella, had furnished another ready suspect. In Outside the Gate, McIntire attempted to fix the yoke of guilt around Billy Graham’s neck as well. By collaborating with liberals and by downplaying differences between conservatives as if the tiniest jots and tittles of doctrine were not matters of eternal consequence, Graham and his colleagues in the New Evangelical camp were in danger of participating in what “could very easily be the church of the Antichrist, Babylon the Great, the Scarlet Woman, the Harlot Church, described in Revelation 17 and 18.” By summoning Evangelical leaders from all over the world to Berlin, and by arranging and controlling the program so that virtually all dissent over matters of doctrine was squelched, Graham was conditioning Evangelicals for eventual membership in the World Council, after which the rapture and the tribulation could not be far behind.

  Carl McIntire may have accorded Billy Graham and the Berlin Congress a more pivotal role in cosmic history than they deserved, but it was not an insignificant gathering. The New York Times published daily stories about it, and scores of major daily newspapers gave it front-page treatment. The Religious News Service reported that its coverage matched that given the Second Vatican Council, and Vatican Radio itself took sympathetic notice. A Religious News Service reporter, in fact, went so far as to compare Graham to Pope John XXIII. “The spirit of Pope John,” he said, “hovered over the council. Billy Graham was physically, palpably, and inescapably present at the Congress, speaking admirably and holding together forces that would unquestionably have exploded in all directions save for his presence.” That assessment may have overstated the assembly’s potential fissiparousness, but it was certainly the case that hundreds of people who ordinarily had little or nothing to do with each other found barriers crumbling and suspicions melting as t
hey came to feel that their shared enthusiasm for evangelism more than offset their differences over doctrine and polity. Perhaps the most important discovery came with the recognition by representatives of traditionally Evangelical denominations that even members of traditionally non-Evangelical bodies might share many of their same concerns. Religion journalist Jim Newton recalled that the Berlin Congress was “the first really big conference for Evangelicals. It was a mind-blowing experience [for Evangelicals] to meet with Methodists, Presbyterians, Coptics, and Orthodox who were concerned about evangelism. They all had this image that any church affiliated with the World Council was bound to be a liberal church and, therefore, not concerned about evangelism. Berlin shattered that stereotype. Just exploded it, as nothing had ever done before.” Carl Henry agreed that the congress “shaped a mood in which Evangelicals sensed their larger need of each other and of mutual encouragement and enrichment.” Western delegates, long accustomed to furnishing the impetus for mission efforts in non-Western countries, seemed particularly surprised and affected by what one observer called “the dynamic surge of evangelistic emphasis coming from the newer churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.”